A Review on Game-Theoretic Incentive Mechanisms for Mobile Data Offloading in Heterogeneous Networks

Mobile data offloading through complementary network is an efficient approach to mitigate network congestion and enhance user's Quality of Service (QoS). Data offloading techniques require the investigation of economic benefits for service providers, conflicts resulting from the interplay of different agents, and proper cooperation of the entities involved in the process. Game theory uses mathematical models to understand the interactions among multiagents. It can be utilized to analyse individual or group behaviour of entities for data offloading. Game theory also models the selfish behaviour of nodes and accordingly is useful in designing the reward/punishment mechanisms for the players involved in data offloading game. In this survey, we present an exhaustive review of game models developed to motivate small cell operators, for providing hybrid access in the heterogeneous networks. Specifically, this review aims to cover network-initiated data offloading approaches, in which the cellular operator controls the offloading procedure.